Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Let’s face the truth: your blog is never 100% secure. And there is no all-in-one solution which can make it absolutely secure. No webhost is fully protected either. You cannot just press a magic button ‘Enable Security’ and forget about it. What you CAN do is to follow several basic (and simple enough) tips which will help you to essentially decrease risks of hacking and data loss. Following them may require some additional time, but if thinking about re-creation of the whole site from scratch or explaining to your boss why the URL is now showing a defaced page – then we all would admit that being proactive is worth some time and efforts.

CMS (Content Management System) is a common term describing any kind of software which allows you to build and manage the whole site and all content of it in one place. Though different CMS have major differences, generally all of them have one essential advantage: you do not need to be a programmer (nor system administrator) to start using them.

In this article we will give some tips as for choosing CMS for a blog. First, we will divide all CMS into three big groups:

Self-hosted solutions. These are sitebuilders which you buy (or take for free) along with space and other services integrated (such as Blogger or Tumblr). A brief overview of such solutions was given in the article ‘Choosing Hosting for a Blog’.

Open Source CMS. These are widely used solutions most of which can be easily installed at any web-hosting platform, free of charge. The most popular ones are WordPress (140+ million sites), Joomla (30+ million sites) and Drupal (15+ million sites). We will compare them and give more information further in this article.

Custom CMS. This is something either developed from scratch or essentially changed specifically for your needs and needs of your site. They require involvement of a technical specialist (a whole company in some cases) and of course serious investments.

In this article we will try to provide some general tips for beginners as for choosing hosting for a blog, without going deep into technical aspects. In order not to be prejudiced, we will focus on comparing characteristics instead of comparing companies. So, the main steps to take:

If you are reading this, we take it you are just starting your way into the workings of web hosting and are looking to host your web site online.

Web site hosting as a whole may seem difficult and hard to understand, but worry not! We here at SiteValley like to make things easy for people, that is why we have decided to prepare a series of articles covering the basics of web hosting for absolute beginners. We also have hosting plans specifically designed for such beginners – but more on that later.Read the rest of this entry »

There are two types of system administrators: those who don’t make backups *so far* and those who *already* do. There is always a chance that due to different circumstances (such as out-of-date CMS being compromised or a file being deleted by mistake) all your efforts to develop the project can go to the dogs. Regular backups will help to save your data and your heart in such cases.

First, we would like to tell about making backups of the virtual hosting accounts. Since our virtual hosting uses cPanel interface, many users are used to make a backup through the panel itself. In the process of the backup creation with the help of cPanel, the archive is downloaded via browser to the local PC or via ftp to the remote client’s server. However, such procedure is not very convenient and in the latter case it requires an ftp server and enough disc space on it.

As an alternative, we provide Continuous Data Protection (CDP). We have first tested this technology in making backups of our internal resources. The test was successful and so it was decided to offer CDP option to our customers (already enabled for our S3 and S4 virtual hosting plans). The main advantage here is usability. Backups are created daily without requiring any actions from the user. There is one backup (recovery point) for each of the last seven days and also one for each of the last two months available to the user. All the files stored in the recovery point can be viewed through a friendly interface. You can restore or download a separate file as well as the whole backup.